I graduated from the University of Washington in 2008 with a degree in Business Administration (Marketing), and immediately entered the professional online marketing world. I founded AudienceBloom in April 2010, and have since become a columnist for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, and Huffington Post. My personal blog is located at AudienceBloom.com/blog. I guest lecture for marketing classes at the University of Washington, and currently reside in Seattle, WA.

How to Find Your Company's Voice

In a recent piece on her blog, author Justine Musk describes the process of finding your own voice and owning your life. Her articulate, engaging piece is focused on the entrepreneur or individual’s personal journey. But her message resonated with me as I thought about the struggles that many companies face in articulating their own stories and finding their voice in the market.

The surge in popularity and buzz surrounding content marketing has opened up a tremendous opportunity – but also created a great deal of responsibility and anxiety – for businesses to tell their own stories. As Musk says, “When you are a presence that lacks a voice, you create an empty space that another voice – a dominating voice that knows no boundaries – is only too happy to fill.”

Are you taking the steps to find your voice as a business, and reflect that out to the market, or are you letting your competitors, the media, customers, and others shape your message?

Voice vs. Brand

Building a brand is smart on every level – from building trust to establishing the context for how your message is heard in the world. But it’s important to answer the question: Where does your company’s “voice” fit in in terms of brand? And how do you find it and define it?

Voice is part of your branding and yet separate from it. Your brand encompasses many things:

Knowing who you’re speaking to

What you’re saying

How you’re saying it

The creative/design aspects – both graphic and copy

Articulating your USP or unique selling proposition

The channels you use to share that message

The process that you use to adhere to these points with consistency across channels

Voice touches all of these things, but embodies specific aspects of it more completely than others. Let’s break down each element into detail.

Knowing who you’re speaking to:A company’s voice has to have resonance with customers and prospects for it to work. It has to resonate with your vision and your perspective, but it also (most especially) has to resonate with your audience.

Consider this – would you use the same voice to talk to a Tucker Max fan that you would use to talk to a follower of Kenneth Copeland Ministries? It’s an extreme example, but my point is simple: you must know who you’re talking to. If your voice doesn’t match their needs and expectations, your messaging will miss its mark.For more information on learning what your target audience wants, see my article, “7 Ways to Find What Your Target Audience Wants and Create Epic Content.”

What you’re saying:You also have to know what you want to say. What’s your big message? What is your business trying to accomplish in the world? And bluntly, so what? Why is your message of broader significance, to the market in general and to your target customers in particular?

Your messaging matters both in terms of clarifying the right tone or vehicle to say it – and also clarifying the message itself. Your messaging needs to straddle an important line: it’s where you have to express what’s true about your business and also connect that to what’s most important to your customers. If your business has been well designed to fit a market need, this will be a natural fit. But for other firms, making that connection requires deep introspection to identify the highest priorities on both sides of the fence and craft a compelling connection.

How you’re saying it: Musk makes an excellent point about voice: you have to keep looking until you find the right medium for your unique voice. For a person, the answer could be painting, writing fiction or dance. For a writer, you could drill down and argue that the medium could be long-form narrative or biographies or romance novels or blog posts about SEO. From a business perspective, there are multiple layers to the “how” you communicate:

Your tone

Your approach

Your medium

I want to double down on medium, because this is a critical piece of the content marketing discussion. If you look at a pre-created content marketing plan, it often ticks off items that you have to do. Write and publish one new post each business day on your blog. Develop and place one guest post a week. Create a great opt-in guide for your e-newsletter list. All of these are valid, and I would argue important, strategies.

But here’s the thing: not every strategy works for every business. Some entrepreneurs hit their stride when they launch a podcast. Others are natural writers. Some businesses can’t effectively convey their essence without visuals and movement, and video is a natural platform for them to find their voice. The big takeaway here is this: if you’re not getting traction with one kind of content, keep experimenting.

I’m not advocating experimenting to the point of sunk costs, but I am arguing that it’s important to test enough so that you can find your voice and the content style that works for you. The right medium can make all the difference for a business struggling to articulate what it is and why that matters in the broader world.For more ideas on putting different types of content to work for your business, check out these articles:

A valid question from marketers is: so what exactly is your voice? Think of your favorite writer, especially novelists, but perhaps a talented reporter or non-fiction writer. Plots and characters make up fiction. Descriptions, interviews, and facts tend to make up journalistic pieces. But two writers can handle the same story in very different ways.

The same concept applies to the way companies do business, and how they express their voice. Consider, for example, two lawn care companies serving the same territory. One might work to have a super professional image, with their staff dressed in uniforms, driving spotless vans, and using branded equipment. Their competitor is 2/3 the cost, but the workers show up basic work clothes and don’t have fancy pamphlets about how to make your azaleas thrive. Each company might be the right fit for their specific kind of customer. The way in which they communicate those differences happens at every level:

What forms of content they use

The vocabulary they use to describe what they do

The overall tone of their pieces

The way that they describe, and appeal to, their ideal customer

The optics or visuals of how their messaging is presented

The bigger message behind what they do

What benefits are emphasized to their potential customers

Knowing your customer, and thinking about what you want to communicate to that customer through your interactions, is how to get a solid sense of your voice.

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